The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Wordsworth Classics) Paperback – May 5 1992

  “It’s not all rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism. It’s the only panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents, I’d not be content to work ten years, condemned to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man’s son an automobile.”

F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“‘Her voice is full of money,’ he [Gatsby] said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. … high in a white palace, the king’s daughter, the golden girl. …”

The Great Gatsby

“Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I suppose?” “Quite possibly,” admitted Amory. “Of course, it’s overflowing just as the French Revolution did, but I’ve no doubt it’s really a great experiment and worthwhile.”

The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald’s superb novel is set in the summer of 1922. The plot is about a young man from the Midwest, Nick Carraway. Carraway sells bonds on Wall Street and lives on Long Island. As Fitzgerald points out, Carraway lives in a small house compared to the huge mansions surrounding him. The enigmatic Jay Gatsby owns one. Gatsby lives close to a philandering husband, Tom Buchanan, who represents older money to Gatsby’s new wealth. Gatsby has made his millions (through bootlegging and stock fraud in partnership with gangster Meyer Wolfsheim.

As the Marxist art critic David Walsh writes, “Fitzgerald’s work is a brilliant effort, easy to underestimate in its brevity, delicacy and the simplicity of the drama. The novel has something of the diaphanous sensibility of Keats, the author’s favourite poet. At the same time, it is an angry, scathing work, as thoroughgoing a debunking of the “American dream” as there ever has been”.

The Great Gatsby is a deceptive book. While it is only 146 pages long, it is an extraordinarily insightful look into the intellectual and social life of the top echelons of the American ruling elite during the first part of the 20^th century.

 As Walsh writes, “ A novel is not a history book or a political manifesto. The important artist accumulates thoughts, feelings, moods and themes over the course of years and works them into concrete and coherent imagery charged with meaning. Any serious work also includes ambiguities, complexities, and “asymmetrical” elements that are not easily reducible to immediate social analysis. However, the individual artist does not draw his or her conceptions and emotions from empty space, nor are they simply the expression of eternal psycho-biological urges. Significant artistic ideas and representations are always shaped by collective human experience by historical and social development. Fitzgerald thought a good deal about political events and social life. His books and letters only have to be read carefully for that to become apparent. Born in 1896, the novelist belonged to a generation deeply affected by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and subsequent developments.”[1]

Fitzgerald's very subtle hints about the racist and fascist outlook of a section of the American bourgeoisie are dropped into the text like a bombshell.  One example is when Tom Buchanan talks about a book he has read called The Rise of the Colored Empires, “by this man Goddard.” He goes on: “The idea is if we don’t look out, the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”Fitzgeralds' fictionalized reference is to Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). A deeply reactionary. Stoddard was a Nazi sympathizer and anti-communist who wrote “Bolshevism: The Heresy of the Underman” and “Social Unrest and Bolshevism in the Islamic World.”

Fitzgerald was not a Marxist or Communist, although he certainly knew his way around Marx’s great works such as Das Kapital Walsh writes, “One need not overestimate the references in Fitzgerald’s letters to “We Marxians…,” “I’m still a socialist …,” “I’m a Communist enough …”, to grasp the degree to which he knew his way around these issues.

The Great Gatsby works on many levels. Aside from being a great story, Gatsby is a stinging attack on the rich in America. In a line that could describe America's ruling elite today, Fitzgerald writes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …”

 

 

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/14/grea-m14.html

The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution-by Tariq Ali-Verso publications-2017

“Before 30, a revolutionary. After 30, a swine!”

French expression,

Gentlemen, we can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future. I would like to warn you against the mistake that causes people to advance the hands of their clocks, thinking that thereby they are hastening the passage of time. My influence on the events I took advantage of is usually exaggerated, but it would never occur to anyone to demand that I should make history. I could not do that even in conjunction with you, although together, we could resist the whole world. We cannot make history; we must wait while it is being made. We will not make fruit ripen more quickly by subjecting it to the heat of a lamp, and if we pluck the fruit before it is ripe, we will only prevent its growth and spoil it.

Otto Von Bismark

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”

― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution

It has been one hundred years since the death of Vladimir Lenin. I had intended to mark the occasion with a review of one of his books. Therefore, I must apologise to my readership that I chose instead to review a book by such a political scoundrel and political opportunist of the worst sort.

Ali was born into a prominent family in Lahore. His uncle was the chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence. While studying at Oxford, he joined the International Marxist Group in 1968. The hallmark of the IMG was the British section of the Pabloite movement, a group specialising in political provocation.

Ali is Verso’s go-to man on anything connected with Lenin. This says more about Verso’s politics than it does about Ali. Given Ali's close association with Stalinism, he should not be allowed anywhere near Vladimir Lenin. Ali supported Gorbachev and Perestroika in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.

He believed Perestroika was a great advance for socialism. He even dedicated his book Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going?, published in 1988, to Boris Yeltsin, who later presided over capitalist restoration in the USSR. He said of Yeltsin that his “political courage has made him an important symbol throughout the country and that “The scale of Gorbachev’s operation is, in fact, reminiscent of the efforts of an American president of the nineteenth century: Abraham Lincoln.”

The Dilemmas of Lenin contains no new research and a very limited insight into the mind and actions of Lenin. Ali is correct in saying that the Russian Revolution would not have happened without the brain of Lenin, as Ali points out in his introduction, “ First things first. Without Lenin, there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much, we can be certain. Fresh studies of the events have only hardened this opinion. The faction and later the Party that he painstakingly created from 1903 onward was not up to the task of fomenting revolution during the crucial months between February and October 1917, the freest period ever in Russian history. A large majority of its leadership, before Lenin’s return, was prepared to compromise on many key issues. The lesson is that even a political party – specifically trained and educated to produce a revolution – can stumble, falter and fall at the critical moment.”[1]

Ali deals at length with the “Lenin cult” and the attempt by the Stalinists to turn Lenin into a harmless liberal icon. Lenin believed this would happen to all the leaders of the Bolshevik party, writing, “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”[2]

While Ali deals with the early attack on Lenin’s revolutionary edge, his failure to examine more modern-day attempts to bury Lenin under many dead dogs is unforgivable and hard to understand. However, when one starts to investigate Ali’s political trajectory, only one conclusion can be drawn: Ali has no interest in defending Lenin’s “revolutionary edge”. The only ones interested in re-establishing Lenin’scontemprary importance are the Trotskyists of the International Committee of the Fourth International(ICFI).

In a two-part Series, the Marxist David North defends Lenin’s revolutionary edge from the blunt blade of Professor Sean McMeekin. McMeekin wrote an article for the New York Times in which he accused Lenin, amongst other things, of being a German Spy.[3] His article was based on his 2017 book The Russian Revolution: A New History, which North said” cannot be described as a work of history because McMeekin lacks the necessary level of knowledge, professional competence and respect for facts. McMeekin’s book is simply an exercise in anti-communist propaganda from which no one will learn anything.”[4]

He continued, “Why did he write the book? Aside from the lure of easy money (anti-communist works are usually launched with substantial publicity and guaranteed positive reviews in the New York Times and many other publications), McMeekin has a political motive. At the start of this year, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “A spectre is haunting world capitalism: the spectre of the Russian Revolution.” McMeekin is among the haunted. He writes in the book’s epilogue, “The Specter of Communism,” that capitalism is threatened by growing popular discontent, and the appeal of Bolshevism is again on the rise. “Like the nuclear weapons born of the ideological age inaugurated in 1917, the sad fact about Leninism is that once invented, it cannot be uninvented. Social inequality will always be with us, along with the well-intentioned impulse of socialists to eradicate it.” Therefore, “the Leninist inclination is always lurking among the ambitious and ruthless, especially in desperate times of depression or war that seem to call for more radical solutions.” McMeekin continues: “If the last hundred years teach us anything, we should stiffen our defences and resist armed prophets promising social perfection.” [5]

In some ways, Ali and McMeekin are two sides of the same coin. Both attempt to bury Lenin's revolutionary struggle, his true legacy and contemporary importance. The only organisation on the planet that can truly celebrate and thank Lenin for his insight and revolutionary struggle and bring him to a new audience is the orthodox Marxists of the ICFI.

 

 

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[1] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3230-tariq-ali-asks-why-lenin

[2] ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution

[3] Was Lenin a German Agent?By Sean Mcmeekin-June 19, 2017-https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-german-agent.html

[4] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders (Part I)- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html

[5] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders (Part I)- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html 

The Future of British Historical Studies

Christopher Thompson 

Wed, 7 Feb at 12:09

I have been following the contributions to the debates on the future of British Studies on the NACBS website with considerable interest. There is a degree of pessimism in some of these contributions about the prospects for this field in general and about the employment prospects for existing and aspiring academic historians in particular. There are sound reasons for these apprehensions, not least because governments and universities' administrations across the English-speaking countries are focused on wealth creation, on subjects that improve the performance of their economies like the sciences, technology and mathematics.  Amongst the wider public in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, on the other hand, there is intense interest in the past, in the histories of countries and communities, localities, social groups and individuals. In that sense, historical studies are in robust health and are likely to remain so. It is to the credit of the Royal Historical Society in the United Kingdom that it has responded to the threats to History Departments here by developing a strategy to contact public decision makers about the merits of the subject and its importance in the cultural and intellectual life of this country.

I do not think that it is very likely that historical subjects will come under threat in universities like those at Oxford and Cambridge. Elsewhere, I fear that some accountants and administrators see history as a soft and dispensable target. This is a profound mistake. Nonetheless, I do believe that historians engaged with the past of the British Isles should begin to make a more active use of the resources of the internet to establish links to archival resources for the subject, to create more enduring on-line institutions to promote the subject, to make available teachers and teaching to those unable to gain entry to courses at universities, to supply suitable teaching materials and so on. Sites like Philosophy Bites have been highly successful in addressing the needs of those interested in that subject.  The Open University has been able to reach outside traditional audiences to address the interests of those beyond the customary audiences for the discipline of history.

The time to start preparing alternatives as a supplement to and support for the subject has arrived. It is not a counsel of despair but one of prudent anticipation and preventative action here and across other English-speaking countries. It is not a perfect solution but it may help to avert a worse outcome.

  

Mateo Ballester Rodriguez, Los Ecos de un Regicidio.La Recepcion de la Revolucion Inglesa y sus Ideas Politicas en Espana (1640-1660)

 By Chris Thompson

How the events of the 1640s and 1650s and their consequences are to be assessed is one of the enduring issues that historians of the British Isles have to face. The analysis of their varying interpretations is in itself a subject of continuing interest. By and large, historians based in these islands and in English-speaking countries overseas have shown less interest in and devoted less time to the studies undertaken by historians, by historical sociologists and political scientists in other countries. Nonetheless, such studies do exist and throw an interesting light on how these events were seen and are now interpreted elsewhere.

Mateo Ballester Rodriguez’s essay published in 2015 is one such example. It is partly a bibliographical description of the limited printed publications that appeared in the Iberian peninsula and the apparently exiguous manuscript material dealing with the conflicts in England in the period from 1640 to 1660. But it has some opening remarks by Rodriguez himself on the significance of the disputes over sovereignty in England and some further remarks covering the observations of figures from the world of political science on the same subject. Many of the latter like Liah Greenfeld or Hans Kohn or John Breuilly have not appeared on my horizon before.

Rodriguez’s formulation of his own analysis is relatively straightforward. He held that there was a struggle between the supporters of traditional beliefs in the divine rights of monarchs who stood at the apex of English society and the adherents of novel ideas about the location of national sovereignty in the institution of Parliament. On the whole, Anglicans and Catholics supported King Charles I while radical Puritans were committed to religious toleration and thus to Parliament’s cause.Absolutist political theorists like Thomas Hobbes were rejected by advocates of legal equality like the Levellers and, later, by John Locke. Admittedly, the conflicts of the first and second Civil Wars divided English people of all ranks but Parliament’s victory on the battlefields ensured that the new concept of authority resting in the nation and embodied in Parliament was secured. Kings and the Church of England were disposed of. One or two echoes of Christopher Hill’s work were clearly reflected.

Liah Greenfeld apparently argued that the idea of the nation as the repository of political authority, as the basis of political authority and the object of loyalty was first embraced in England during its Revolution. Hans Kohn came to the view that the Revolution represented the first example of modern religious, political and social nationalism. On the other hand, John Breuilly thought that it was difficult to make the nation the repository of the principle of sovereignty or to figure out how that principle could be institutionally embodied in the Rump and the Parliaments of the Protectorate. In any case, the phenomenon disappeared when political stability was re-established after the Restoration in 1660. Very little of the intriguing and intense debates in the British Isles ever found their way into the hands of the subjects of the Iberian Habsburgs in print or in manuscript as Rodriguez went on to show. Ideological considerations and the practice of self-censorship undoubtedly played a part in this outcome even though, in Holland and Venice, interest in such events was much more obvious.

It is tempting to criticise some of these contentions. How far printed publications in the British Isles reflected the balance of contemporaries’ opinions is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine. Highly interesting though they are, the views of groups like the Levellers and Diggers may not be as indicative of wider political opinions as their admirers in more modern times believe. Puritans were not in any event all of one kind nor were they uniformly advocates of religious toleration. All the regimes in England after 1646, in Scotland and Ireland after 1651 depended on military force to remain in power. Once the confidence of the soldiery was lost and the supporters of Protectoral or republican rule became too divided, the return of monarchical rule and of the pre-1640 state churches was increasingly likely. Historical sociologists and political theorists alike need to look more closely at the historical evidence before they venture onto the turf of historians.